Strange Unicode Issue on Intel Mac

I took delivery of a new Macbook (the Blacbook) Monday. Since then, I’ve been working to get everything setup just how I like it (the thought of just copying over a Home directory sounds boring. Plus, this way I get a chance to keep things clean—as if that’s going to last).

First off, this thing is freakin’ cool—and I must say that I look smokin’ hot while sittin’ at the driver’s seat. HOWEVER…there are a few issues.

For my money, the Intel version of OS X seems to be a bit buggy. I’ve had strange things happen with signatures in Mail, Calculator has crashed, and, most disturbing of all, unicode keeps giving me issues. Because I do a lot of typing in Greek (and a little in Hebrew), unicode is absolutely imperative.

For the first several days, it was impossible to get this thing to show a final sigma (ς) in a web browser. I have several unicode fonts installed (such as Lucida Grande and Gentium). But these weren’t working. I contacted Joe Weaks over at the Macintosh Biblioblog. He ran me through a couple of ideas, but nothing seemed to work.

While all of this was going on, my little sigmas started working in other applications. I could now type them in Word and Mellel. Then they started popping up just fine in Safari. Still, Firefox and Camino (my browser of choice) were not working properly.

This morning, I woke up and logged on to Withering Fig, only to find final sigmas a-plenty being displayed by Camino.

What is going on?

I’m not going to complain, since things are working now. I’m not even going to investigate the issue further for fear of upsetting my volatile little blacbook. I am just going to go on my merry way and chalk it up to the Intel gremlins. I have clicked off the item in my OmniFocus that says “Fix Greek characters…unicode is being poopy…” — it is no longer an issue.

This sounds like a font cache issue. Each application has its own font cache and some “reset” more often than others. I find if I am having to work in Word (on rare occasions) and need a font I just installed, I need to clease the font caches. A good way to do this is with a great program I use for computer maintenance called Onyx.

p.s. I see by the reference to OmniFocus that you’re a fellow GTD’r – good stuff! Have you tried out iGTD? I have found that to be the most robust Mac GTD program, and free to boot!

I’ll keep the font cache issue in check…maybe that’s what was going on.
As for iGTD, I used to use it, but stopped for two reasons: (1) I’m an omnigroup fanboy, and (2) I felt like I was getting lost in it. I think it’s “robustness” scares me off…I want simple. OmniFocus is really working out so far…but I don’t know about the $40 price tag.

Oddy enough, this is EXACTLY the problem I’ve had. I got my MacBook almost a year ago and didn’t have this problem (though it’s possible that I did and have simply forgotten… in any case, it worked perfectly for months). A month ago I backed up and reformatted my hard drive, then reinstalled Firefox. Now it can’t read or write a final sigma, though it displays everything else fine (polytonic characters and all). I think.